A great brand position, brand promise or even strategy that sits in a deck without being used is 100% worthless. So while thinking strategically is a great start, you need to activate the brand in order to see your employer brand’s value. While we’ve talked about specific channels and media before, we’ve never thought through […]

While I’m a big believer and proponent of opening the doors to let everyone find frustration and satisfaction at work, as a middle-ages white guy, I always feel out of my depth. Luckily, I know a guy who lives and breathes diversity. We have yet another rambling conversation on what its going to take to […]

Haven’t we been doing this recruiting thing for a LONG time already? Does it feel like we’re not really getting any better at it, that we’re all throwing up our hands and giving up that things can be better. And if we look at recruiters and sourcers and HRBPs and hiring managers as independent actors […]

Today, we try a little experiment and talk to my friend and recruitment marketing genius Tracey Parsons. Topics covered along the way: why doesn’t the business work well with recruiting, creating surprise and delight in candidates and just how low the bar is t0 making most candidates thrilled to apply. If you enjoyed this “experiment,” […]

How do you define “strategy?” Go ahead. I’ll wait. It’s a lot harder than you might expect. Now take the definition and see how it fits as your employer brand strategy. A little awkward? Here’s the deal: it’s very rare that any of us are taught “strategy” as a concept, and yet our jobs depend […]

It’s so much easier to work on and with the things we control. But… that’s pretty limiting, isn’t it? Especially in our jobs where we control almost nothing at all. If you want to succeed as an employer brand or recruitment marketing pro, the smart move is to ignore the things we control and focus […]

If your employer brand is the perception someone has about what it must be like to work there. where does that perception come from? More to the point, what can we do to influence and shape that perception? The answer isn’t a campaign or a project, tool or seminar. The answer is in building great […]

Freshly back from Talent Brand Summit an 100+ employer brand pros, I was struck by how much we talk of tactics, strategies, optimizations, tools and metrics, but very very very little about emotions. But people won’t do anything until they feel something. So let’s start talking about eliciting and sparking emotions in candidates. Show Notes […]

How much time do you think you spend on the tools you and your team use to source and recruit? Add in vendor demos and evaluation trials and internal conversations (not to mention budget conversations) and it adds up. But how often have those tools worked out? How often have they delivered the promised results? […]

Your custom-designed and unique-to-you recruiting process that you developed is 99.995% the same as everyone else’s. When you do everything the same, you attract people who know how to pretend to be the same. Not only does that make it near impossible to understand what makes a candidate different, it also tells the world that […]

Give It Away: The Business Magazine

Do you know what it costs to start a national magaizne these days? Multiple million at the very least, depending on whether or not Tina Brown or Jann Wenner is on the board. Â Where does that money go? Not to writers or designers (they account a tiny fraction of the cost). Maybe a little to the sales team (gotta get all that ad revenue), but that stuff can’t account for half the cost of a magazine.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick of Fast Company. Not the web site, but the magazine. What once was a glorious beacon to those work 2.0’ers who understood the weight of Tom Peter’s “The Work Matters” manifesto, one that discussed new models in working, new ideas in getting things done, and trying to cross-pollenate ideas from one industry to the other is now In Style for the laptop-and-business-class set.

Recent covers: McGee, director of Terminator. Sure, he’s got an interesting history but… shouldn’t that be on movie magazine? Skater/surfer kid Shawn White? The current issue some cleavage-bearing woman with hair bigger than Montana. Skin on the cover of Fast Company? This is the same magazine (technically) who’s August 1997 cover was simply “Brand You,” a model just getting traction (And note that the magazine really fell down hard when it stopped putting just typography on the cover and started finding pretty people for the cover… Ning anyone?).

Ask any pro in the publication world and you’ll hear the same thing over and over again: in order to cover the sunk costs of starting up and the hard costs of printing and delivering a magazine, a magazine must sell X number of copies to justify the real engine: subscribers. A magazine doesn’t make money because you buy it, it makes money because it call sell your eyeballs to someone else.

Thus, magazines are a numbers game. If you can’t keep your circulation above certain point, it almost makes more sense to mail all the subscribers a booklet of ads.

But why buy a magaine? Is it for the ads? (Maybe it is for Vogue, but not why I used to buy Wired, Spin, Business Week, Fast Company, The Industry Standard or the Red Herring.) No.

It’s the content, stupid.

You build a customer base by having good ideas, well written and well-presented. That creates fans, increases the circulation base to justify ads. (I swear, the ad model makes as much sense as owning a grocery store not to sell produce put to collect coupons.)

But everyone seems hell-bent on skipping steps 1-5 that they make nothing but crap magazines.

So here’s the solution.

Web-based magazine (duh!). Â But it’s more than that. It’s turning the model around. Â Instead of building a print magazine that makes money and you build a seperate website to remind people how much they love the printed magazine, make the web site first. Â Create great content. Open submissions to anyone. The crowd picks the best articles (and helps copy-edit it), adds great comments and you pick the best stuff (and the comments), package it up with ads (yes, you have to re-write the ad contract to say you are buying web ads, and that the paper ads come free) and ship it to newstands and people who are willing to buy a paper-based subscription.

How does that work? Well, everyone gets the content for free (plus ads). But in the process, everyone helps build the magazine. Crowd sourcing determines the best ideas (you know, the ones that would sell best on a newstand). You only pay for stories that make it to press. Ad buyers will pay a higher web rate knowing that their ads are also in the print peice.Â

The best part is this: if you want it on the newstand or a subscription, each issue is $30. An annual subscription is $200. No one would buy it? Â Wait. Who buys magazines on a newstand? People in airports waiting to fly business-class. People who can afford it. People who don’t have time to read a whole community site. People who buy subscriptions to summerized business books. Execs who have more money than time. If it’s an amazing magazine that’s built a reputation for bringing new ideas to light first in a well-managed forum (and that’s exactly what the website would be), they’ll pay for it.

The best part? Costs are like nothing. Server space and a couple of drupal managers and a team of copy-editors and designers with an editorial lead. You pay per word relative to the sales, so if no one buys the first few issues, you don’t pay the writers much. But if sales go crazy, writers get paid big bucks, thus drawing more people and ideas out of the woodwork. Print costs are unit-based just like writing, and you can even say that the first year the magazine will be web-only just to get things going.